After leaving her career in rural services to spend more time with her children, Sarah Adler is back in the position she helped create more than a decade ago.
And it feels right.
"We need rural communities to work," she said. "We need agriculture. We need the minerals that come out of these communities. To be able to bring them a wide range of programs, that's a great job to have."
Adler, while working in the state's rural department in the early '90s, helped petition to get Nevada its own state director of rural development through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Until then, Nevada had been a division of either Utah or California's department.
"They're not Nevada," she explained. "They were not serving us."
Once the position was created, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., nominated her to take the reins, and she began serving under the Clinton Administration in 1993.
Adler, who used her maiden name Mersereau to distinguish herself from her then-state senator husband, Ernie Adler, worked with the private and public sectors to invigorate rural Nevada communities.
Among her accomplishments during her first tenure was Pahrump's first hospital, and the agency also secured the loan for builder Tom Metcalf's first office in Carson City, back when the city was still considered rural.
However, after nearly eight years in the position, Adler realized she was spending more time traveling for her job than with her three children.
So she shifted careers, going to Sierra Nevada College in 2000 for her teaching license.
Calling writing "the distinguishable skill to give any child opportunity," she became an English teacher at Carson High School in 2002.
She moved up to a dean at Eagle Valley Middle School, then to the grants coordinator for the school district, with her sights set on becoming a principal. Then everything changed.
"When President Obama was elected, it was way too exciting to pass up the opportunity," she said.
Still, she said, it wasn't an easy decision.
"Teachers are the most important people who walk the earth," she said. "I loved being a teacher. Education
is the most important
thing happening in any
community."
With her three children now off to college, she said, she has the time and energy to devote to the job.
In just her first week in office, she already has projects to report. She said the department, which heads three agencies, is working with several communities to bring both capital and expertise.
"We do a lot of education of our customers in financial literacy," she said. "We explain what it means to finance a water system, what is the best combination of grants and loans and how much they have to put aside to secure financing."
Current projects in the area include an expansion of the geothermal plant in Wabuska and self-help housing in Lyon County. This year alone, she said, the department has spent $25 million guaranteeing home mortgages there.
When President Obama's term ends, she may go back to education, she said. But until then, she can use some of the skills she learned in that field in her new position.
"Just like to middle-schoolers you are an adult and, thereby, there can't be anything good about you, to rural Nevadans you're the government and, thereby, there can't be anything good about you," she said. "It's all about communication. It's building trust."